Category
Meaning, Art & the Good Life
Meaning, death, happiness, love and beauty.
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Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Gregory…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies153 views -
Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?
Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because when we exist death isn't…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies119 views -
Cutting film taught me that clock time and lived time are different things
I cut documentaries in Tehran. A shot of a woman pouring tea can last eight seconds and feel like a minute, or last eight seconds and pass unnoticed, depending on what came before it. Every editor knows this. The clock and the…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam3 replies188 views -
Wu wei for burnt-out founders: what did Laozi actually mean?
After Stoicism, I've been reading the Daodejing. One idea that hits hard is wu wei, usually translated "non-action" or "effortless action". Chapter 48 says that in pursuing learning you add something every day, but in pursuing the Dao you let something go…
Started by Rohan Desai1 reply81 views -
You can believe the universe means nothing and that cruelty is still wrong. Most people do
I came to philosophy through al-Maʿarrī, the blind poet of Maʿarra who called himself a prisoner of two prisons, his blindness and his house. He was a pessimist about almost everything: about the value of being born, about the promises of religion…
Started by Dima Nasser0 replies52 views -
Diogenes was doing stand-up: the Cynic method as performance
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and work in a call centre by day. I've just read the Diogenes stories in Diogenes Laertius, and I'm convinced the man was doing comedy, in the serious sense. Look at the famous ones. Plato…
Started by Gemma Pritchard0 replies67 views -
My kitchen friendships end when people change jobs. Were they only friendships of utility?
I run a kitchen of twenty-two people from nine countries, and for fifteen years the pattern has been the same. You work ten-hour services side by side with someone, you cover for each other, you eat together at midnight, you know about…
Started by Joel D'Souza0 replies42 views -
Would games really be the only thing left worth doing in utopia?
Bernard Suits ends The Grasshopper with a strange and wonderful claim. Imagine a utopia where every instrumental need is met: machines do all the work, nobody needs to earn, build, heal or cook. What would people do? Suits's Grasshopper argues that they…
Started by Sasha Kovalenko0 replies99 views -
Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
I play cello in a chamber ensemble in Seoul and teach children. I recently read the Mohist chapter "Against Music" and I can't stop arguing with it in my head. Mozi's argument, as I understand it: ordinary people have three great worries,…
Started by Moon Ha-eun0 replies83 views -
Testing the theories of laughter on Nasreddin Hodja
Superiority, relief, incongruity, benign violation: I took the philosophers' theories of humour onto my bus route and tried them on the stories my grandfather told.
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu0 replies92 views -
Can a machine be your friend? Aristotle, Buber and the ethics of AI companions
Companion apps are sold as friends and partners. The oldest theory of friendship explains what they can and cannot be, and shows where the real ethical problem lies.
Started by Derek Hollis0 replies46 views -
Clive Bell said representation is irrelevant in art. Can anyone still hold that?
I draw picture books and some manga in Osaka. A friend lent me Clive Bell's Art (1914), and I've been arguing with it all week. Bell says what all real works of visual art share is "significant form": lines and colours combined…
Started by Rin Matsuda0 replies122 views -
What the tea room knows: Rikyū, wabi and taste as an aesthetic sense
European aesthetics long ranked taste below sight and hearing. A Japanese tea gathering suggests the ranking was answering the wrong question.
Started by Aiko Tanabe0 replies75 views -
Our neighborhood grant asked us to prove a mural was ‘art’, not ‘signage’
I'm a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. This spring our block association applied for a small public-art grant to paint a mural on the side of a corner store. The design came from kids at the rec center and…
Started by Dana Whitfield0 replies38 views -
What is aesthetics? A beginner’s guide
Six questions that make up the philosophy of beauty and art, explained for someone meeting them for the first time, with a restorer's view of why they matter.
Started by Chiara Bellandi0 replies84 views -
Should a struggling state pay for music? Mozi and Xunzi’s quarrel
More than two thousand years before modern arts-funding debates, the Mohists argued that music wastes what the poor need, and Xunzi replied that a society without music cannot hold together. Both were partly right.
Started by Chen Yuting0 replies56 views -
Why does sad art feel good? What the rasa theorists worked out
A Sanskrit argument that ran for two centuries gives the most careful answer I know to the old puzzle of enjoying grief on the stage.
Started by Meera Kulkarni0 replies110 views -
Integrity, proportion, radiance: does Aquinas have a theory of beauty or just three words?
Second-year theology student in Galway. In a seminar on Aquinas we hit the passage everyone quotes on beauty: Summa theologiae I, question 39, article 8, where he says beauty requires three things: integrity or perfection (things that are lacking are ugly for…
Started by Aoife Brennan0 replies102 views